22/2/18
I've discovered that mentoring this week was pretty challenging, but I've learnt heaps this week.
Just a few challenges/things that went on:
Monday: I discovered that it was hard to run fun games with the very vague instructions that were left for us, so trying to negotiate the rules that were fair was a tad hard, and we ran across quite a few problems throughout, so I'm surprised the marketing guy (who was in charge of the whole week) wasn't sick of us pharmsci mentors by day's end. Learnt that communication was really important on the day.
Tuesday: I met 7/9 of my mentees- they were extremely quiet and wouldn't talk much, and this proved challenging, especially as two of them were international students, so that taught me a heap of patience as well as other ways to encourage them- I managed to get them to band together by the end of the day with the "element cup" competition, so I'm really glad about that.
Wednesday: Was a better day with ny mentees, they were still really nervous (but who isn't in their situation), but we had a blast playing Kahoot and Quiplash (which is basically an online rip-off of CAH), and I sorta felt like they were starting to open up to me, to the point that one of them was asking me course-related questions whilst I was still out last night- which was pretty cool. I tried showing them the clubs on campus at our clubs carnival, but I think they were more interested in the free sliders we had!
I also met another group of mentees last night for the race around Melbourne, which I was a co-leader of with another mentor. Discovered that I'm pretty rubbish at dancing, but it was really fun! Also went along for the pub crawl after that, but I only stayed for like 2 stops because I was just too tired- but hey, I got to meet an old pharmsci club president who now works at CSL down the road, so +1 for connections! 😍
I've also seen some of my lecture slides for pharmacology and analytical chemistry and I'm slightly nervous now, but I hope it isn't too bad!
Hopefully my start of semester goes well as well, as I'm also doing the Ask Me program on campus for the first 6 weeks, and I'm nervous for what that'll bring as well.